Shopping Smells (Primark)

Name: jillmurphy

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Product:	Primark
Date:	09.03.02 (800 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Um... um... um...

Disadvantages: Um... um... um...

Do you like shopping? I don't. Shops are busy, horribly lit, claustrophobic, and they give me a headache. With the possible exception of bookshops, I'm just not interested. I'm not that big on clothes either, especially if I'm expected to choose them. I know my size in jeans and I really can't see why that isn't enough, for me and for everyone else. However, a couple of times a year I find myself forced to venture into towns with high streets and malls (what a horrible word that is) containing those dreaded things called shops in a quest for "proper" clothes to wear to work. Eurgh.

Just such an expedition took place a few weeks ago. I headed off to Taunton with my mother-in-law who assured me that she knew just the place for recalcitrant shoppers like me. One stop shopping it would be, she promised. And so I found myself in Primark. It didn't look very encouraging from the outside, to be honest, there wasn't much in the way of a fashionable or glamorous window display nothing like that, and stepping through the doors, I didn't feel my confidence rising. Primark looked like just the sort of shop I hate even more than I hate most shops: it was packed full of stock piled high on shelves and squashed onto hundreds of racks with hardly any room between them, the entire place was bathed in that vicious, horrible neon glow, and it was absolutely packed full with a heaving mass of people all frantically purchasing. There were queues at the checkouts. I was feeling claustrophobic and in need of escape before I'd looked at a single thing.

I won't trouble you with the hideous interlude between that moment and the checkout. It was as awful as I thought it would be. I told you already: I hate shopping and I hate choosing clothes. There is always something better to do, always always always. However, I fought my way through the jungle that is Primark on a weekday afternoon and I'll tell you what I bo
ught, because it has to be just about the most successful clothes shopping expedition I've ever been on. Really. I bought:

One black dress
One dark green dress
One dark green pair of trousers
Two white mens shirts
One pair of jeans (for my mother-in-law)
Two pairs of hiking socks
Ten pairs of childrens sports socks
Four white childrens polo shirts

Amazing. I've never bought that many clothes in one go, never ever. Usually, I get fed up after ten minutes, start feeling closed-in, lose my temper, and go home with the first thing I pick up, which always looks horrid when I wear it. Shall I tell you what saw me through the nightmare that is shopping at Primark (or anywhere else for that matter) long enough to choose all that? It was the prices, they're unbelievable. See that list up there? How much do you think it all cost? Even bearing in mind nothing that Primark sells has a silly, in-demand brand name you'd think that I'd spent well over a hundred quid, at least that, wouldn't you? Well, I hadn't. I'd spent less than half that. The whole list of stuff above came to a few pence under £55. Wow. Still, I remained uncertain. At such silly prices all my purchases would turn out to be of terrible quality despite their reasonable appearance and would fall apart after the first wash, surely? Well, not so. Since that expedition I've washed all items several times (except for the jeans because they stayed with my mother-in-law) and none of them lost shape, colour, or went baggy, or shrank. All of them were washable at good old stick-everything-in-the-machine-together 40°, and all of them have made it through both a Murphy wearing day and the Murphy/Zanussi laundering process several times always emerging unscathed. But perhaps we should have a look in a bit more detail:

Both dresses are fitted, above the knee and made of a polyester/viscose mix, both are fully lined, each cost the prince
ly sum of £11. One's a sort of two tone green affair and one's black with pinstripes. Very officey. They really do look quite nice, and are both nicely designed and well-made with proper seams, decent seam allowances and all that jazz, both were even declared to make me look "presentable" by the mistress of picky, my mother. Both have been worn by me to work and both washed and even tumble dried perfectly. Neither required more than a light press of Michael's iron before they were fit to wear. However, one is a size ten, one a size twelve. If you measure them against each other the size twelve is very slightly smaller than the size ten. The childrens socks (five pairs in a pack £2) are,let me check the label, 75% cotton, 15% polyester and 10% elastane (that's the stretchy stuff that stops them falling down in case you didn't know). They didn't shrink either, and the white ones stayed nicely, brightly whiter than white, just like the commercials. However, the ones that belong to Conor are labelled to fit shoe sizes 6-8.5 when Conor's shoe size is 12 and the ones that belong to Kieran are labelled to fit shoe sizes 3-5. Kieran takes a size 9. You see the pattern? When purchasing at Primark I suggest you take little notice of the labels and make very sure you try on everything before you buy it.

I don't know about other branches, I've only visited Taunton, and I hope not to visit Primark, or any other clothes shop for a good while, but the changing rooms in Taunton were, as horrible crowded changing rooms in horrible crowded shops go, quite nice actually. We fitted one Jill, one Nanny, one Conor and one Kieran into our roomy cubicle and still had the space to stand in an albeit squashed line and pull faces at ourselves in the mirror. The staff didn't seem too bothered that four people wanted to try on three items in one cubicle either. So that was nice. If you do make a mistake and trust Primark's erratic s
ize labelling, don't worry too much. I did that with the socks, I didn't realise how ridiculously enormous they were until I'd got home, pulled apart those fiendish plastic mechanisms they use to make five pair packs, and lost the receipt. I always lose receipts, horrid little bits of superfluous paper that they are. Anyway, I took them back, there were no quibbles at the abominably untidy state in which I returned them, no worries that I'd lost the receipt and new, better-sized sets of socks went home with me. (Well, I say I took them back, my mother-in-law did it for me actually, while I waited outside. I couldn't do shopping twice in one day). I gather, also from my mother-in-law, that Primark don't make a fuss if you've just changed your mind and want your money back either, she's done that a few times apparently. They just divvy up with no complaint.

So, all in all, it was a markedly successful, if hideous, shopping expedition we made to Primark. It sells clothes for all ages, a lot of it's the latest gimmicky fashion, some of it's best suited to granny, but some of it's nice, fairly classical stuff that you can wear to work and appear "presentable" in. The polo shirts I bought for Conor and Kieran's school uniforms were as good a quality as any I've bought at Next or Marks and Spencer, or Adams or anywhere and were only £1.75 each. You have to rummage to find it, but it's well worth the rummage for Primark does sell some bargain gems of good quality. It also sells footwear, linen, and some householdy bits and pieces like picture frames and candles although on my visit those ranges all looked rather cheap and nasty. It also had a few (also not very nice) toys. It's one of those places that doesn't keep the same stock for an entire season, rather you just find what you find on the day you visit, you might find a basketful of things you'd like to buy, but then again, you might
find nothing at all.

It's a horrible place really ? shelves and rails are filled to bursting, it's filled to bursting with people too. And an awful lot of the stock is rubbish you wouldn't give houseroom to, it really is. But some of it's super duper value for money. You won't find anything with a label you've ever heard of, but as I'm not at all worried about labels, and Conor and Kieran don't know what labels are yet, thank heavens, that doesn't matter a tiny bit to me. In a lot of ways Primark is rather like that other, even more dreadful shopper's emporium, Matalan, except you don't need a membership card (dear me) to get in and I think that the goods of decent quality are thicker on the ground at Primark. Still, you do have to hunt about through piles and shelves and racks and crowds of people and more piles and more shelves and more racks and more crowds of people to find them.

They take all the major credit cards, have a website found at http://www.primark.co.uk which is sadly what you'd call underdeveloped, but it does list the stores so you can see if there's one near you. Primark. Don't go there unless you have to. Don't go there if, unlike me, you have the slightest awareness of brands or labels and if, unlike me, you think brands or labels may have a positive cost to benefit ratio in your life. Don't go there unless you have to. It's 'orrible. But y'know, a season's clothes (season? That's the right word ain't it?) for work for around £40. I have to give them four stars for that, now don't I?

Shopping still smells though.

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